Travel information has long been available to motorists of all types. Historically, motorists in all types of vehicles would ask route or travel directions from gas station attendants, and convenience store operators or they would consult a map of the local area in question. In 1967, the Global Positioning System (GPS) became commercially available. The GPS system consists of a plurality of satellites that are in orbit around the earth and beam positional information towards the surface of the earth. A receiver on the surface of the earth may, if desired, receive the beamed signals and is able to determine their relative positions. If the receiver is mounted in a vehicle such as an automobile, truck, airplane, or motorcycle, the relative position and direction of travel can be determined by receiving multiple GPS signals and computing the direction of travel. An example of this type of navigational system is produced by ALK Associates under the product name of CO-Pilot 2000.
The motorist, operator, driver, or user of the CO-Pilot 2000 system communicates with the system by entering information concerning this expected destination and CO-Pilot 2000 plots the trip using GPS information. The CO-Pilot 2000 may, if desired, enunciate approaching intersections and respond to voice commands from the user. This type of system is dedicated to the vehicle and the navigational information derived from GPS positional notation of the vehicle is for the users of the system and is not transmitted to a third party. If the user in the vehicle desires communication with a third party, he must use a wireless form of communication such as an analog or digital telephone i.e., cellular or PCS telephone.
An automatic communication link between a user in the vehicle and the third party can be established. Current technology permits collision detection of the vehicle and notification of the collision to a third party. The Transportation Group of Veridian Engineering Company manufactures a product entitled the Mayday System. The Mayday System combines Co-Pilot 2000 like technology with wireless telephone technology to produce a system that automatically communicates the vehicle's position to a third party. The third party is a tracking station or base station that is operator attended. If the user is involved in a vehicular collision, the Mayday System senses the collision and notifies the base station via wireless communication. The actual vehicular collision sensors encode the collision event in digital data form and transmit the data to the base station. The receiving base station plots the data on an operator attended computer screen. The operator can visually recognize that a particular vehicle collision has occurred and can take appropriate action or perform a predetermined sequence of tasks. Examples of predetermined tasks may include contacting emergency services in the vicinity of the vehicular collision or communicating directly with the vehicle to determine the extent of damage to the vehicle, or injuries to the driver or vehicle occupants. In effect, the third party contacted by the Mayday system directs the efforts to a fourth party. The fourth party may be emergency services of some type or any other response to the directive data from the vehicle.
The Mayday system is predicated on the need for receiving the third party base station operator having a computer screen capable of plotting the received encoded digital information from the vehicle in order to determine its location. The user must also be physically able to respond to voice communications from the base station operator. The functional caveat of the Mayday System is that if no encoded information is received from the vehicle the base station operator will never be informed that a vehicular collision has occurred. If the user of the Mayday system is physically impaired due to the inability to speak or does not speak the language of the base station operator, the user cannot communicate directly with the operator.
It would be desirable to have an automatic vehicle location and collision notification system that would ascertain if a vehicular collision had occurred and communicate directly with an emergency facility. The system would notify an emergency facility in the vicinity of the vehicular collision without first notifying an intermediate operator who has to relay the collision event and possible emergency necessity to the emergency facility. The system would be capable of transmitting vehicle collision location data and pertinent data concerning the vehicle operator or occupants. It would be able to translate and transform this data into synthetic voice communication using any desired language for the present location of the vehicle. The synthetic voice communication would speak the vehicle collision location and pertinent data directly to a third party who would immediately dispatch emergency personnel to the collision location. If the system were unable to communicate with a first selected third party, the system would speak the data to a second or subsequent selected third party. This process of communicating would continue until a voice link between the system and a third party was established.